BASF devises chiral process
15 Jan 2000
A new plant for the production of optically active intermediates is to be built at BASF's Ludwigshafen headquarters, continuing the company's vertical integration from naphtha down to pharmaceuticals. With a capacity of over 1000tpa, the plant will be the largest enzyme-catalysed multiproduct facility in the world.
The plant, set to come on-stream in the second half of 2000, will operate a process capable of producing chirally-pure amines, aminoalcohols or aminocarboxylic acid derivatives.
Currently, most optically-active compounds are produced as racemates - that is, a mixture of both enantiomers - which are separated by selective crystallisation. This is a batch process, and is inherently slow and inefficient, producing large amounts of the wrong enantiomer and using large volumes of solvents and reagents.
BASF's new process is continuous. It generates a racemic mixture of amine enantiomers, then uses a lipase enzyme to add an acyl fragment to the amine group of only one enantiomer (see diagram). This can then be recovered by distillation, giving a high yield of the optically-pure enantiomer. The solvents, reagents and the unwanted enantiomer are recycled back into the process.
The plant is due to come on-stream in the second half of 2000; in the meantime, R&D teams are working on methods to synthesise optically-active alcohols.
